Piyush Gupta will stand down as group chief executive of DBS Bank when he retires in March, it was announced on Wednesday. He is to be replaced by Tan Su Shan, the firm’s head of institutional banking.
The news is a defining moment for the Singapore lender. By any reasonable measure, Gupta can be considered DBS’s most successful CEO, and arguably its most ambitious and charismatic.
The 64-year-old joined the bank in 2009 after a 27-year stint at Citi, where his final job was chief executive of southeast Asia-Pacific.
At the time, DBS was known for being – in the words of former chief data and transformation officer Paul Cobban – “bureaucratic, unimaginative and unresponsive”. Customers frustrated at long in-branch queues and defective ATMs had taken to snarking the lender behind its back.
Instead of calling it the Development Bank of Singapore, its formal name until a simplifying 2003 rebrand, DBS was better known around the Lion City as ‘damn bloody slow’. It was a digital laggard and had failed to present a coherent regional strategy, struggling to gain scale in Thailand and Indonesia, and overpaying heavily in 2001 for Hong Kong’s Dao Heng Bank.
Gupta set out to change all that. The first few years of his reign were profitable, but largely unremarkable, as the India-born banker focused on navigating a more complex post-global financial-crisis world, and generally fixing DBS’s internal plumbing.
Big-tech turnaround
Around four years into his tenure, something changed. At a 2013 senior staff offsite in Seoul, Gupta told his assembled lieutenants it was time to stop comparing the bank with other lenders, and to instead pit itself against big-tech names such as Amazon. After a chance meeting with Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, Gupta saw for the first time the threat fintechs posed to commercial banks such as his. In response, he charged his digital team with trawling the world for inspiration and answers, and mopping up ideas in Silicon Valley and Japan.
What emerged was a plan to become the world’s best digital bank, and ultimately the world’s best bank, by a) being digital to the core, b) embedding itself in the customer journey and c) transforming a staid, old lender into an excitingly frothy 29,000-person start-up. ‘Making banking joyful’ became the rallying cry. “We had to stop thinking: ‘What will other banks do?’ We had to start thinking: ‘What would big tech do’,” Gupta told Euromoney later.
Gupta will depart the bank with his head held high and the applause of the bank’s army of workers ringing in his ears
None of this would have been possible without Gupta’s effortless charisma, drive, cheeriness and seeming inexhaustibility. During the next eight years, he morphed into a genuine rock-star banker, giving his time freely to journalists. Many scribes at Euromoney, including this one, have sat down for a “quick half-hour with Piyush” that stretched into an hour, then 90 minutes, then two hours. He never, ever, had nothing to say.
In this period, DBS finally broke through to become Singapore’s biggest and most expansionist lender, snapping up assets in China and in India. Staff and management genuinely loved him, and an ability to inspire loyalty was akin to that of Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s much adored and recently departed manager. Gupta, handily, was an avid fan of the English football club.
These were the wonder years. In 2018, DBS was named the world’s best digital bank in our annual awards for excellence, due in large part to its willingness to quantify exactly what digitalization meant for profitability, and to view everything through a lens of disruption and technology.
A year later, we named DBS the world’s best bank. In our write-up, we cited its status as a global digital leader, a bank that plays to its strengths, and its geographic and balance-sheet diversity. We called it the “epitome of a regional bank that is clearly world class in what it does”. And we praised the “passion, energy and commitment” he and his team brought to the task of making DBS a “modern bank for a future world”. Two years later, it won the award again.
That was the high point. In November 2021, the bank suffered a two-day tech outage. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) urged it to address the issue, but more followed, including five outages in 2023 alone. The MAS imposed higher capital requirements on the bank, worth S$1.6 billion ($1.21 billion). Then in November 2023, the regulator imposed a six-month pause on non-essential IT changes, to force it to boost digital resilience.
DBS was hardly a passenger in the process. Gupta set up a committee to oversee technology risk, and enhance independent checks and balances. Oversight of technology risk management was put under the purview of chief risk officer Soh Kian Tiong. It also split the tech and operations functions into two units, to ensure dedicated oversight of both.
It’s hard not to avoid the temptation of drawing a line between a gruelling push to be the best at digital banking, and its later struggles to comprehend and quell outages. So often, a rush to be great at one thing results in other facets of a business getting overlooked.
The outages were a humiliation for DBS and by extension for its CEO. Yet Gupta will depart the bank in March with his head held high and the applause of the bank’s army of workers ringing in his ears. He put DBS on the world map and made it what it is, and he has earned a retirement that will surely be spent reading, bird watching – one of his favourite hobbies – and spending time with his grandchildren.
Logical successor
Gupta’s successor, then, has big shoes to fill. So it’s a good thing that DBS appears to have got its succession plans right.
Tan Su Shan has long been viewed as the logical person to replace a giant of the banking world. The shortlist also included group head of consumer banking and wealth management Shee Tse Koon, Singapore country head Han Kwee Juan, and group head of strategy, transformation, analytics and research Lim Him Chuan.
Charismatic and energetic, Tan is seen internally as a team player and the kind of person willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work. She joined DBS in 2010 after 13 years at Morgan Stanley and Citi, working at the latter alongside Gupta. She rose to head the consumer banking division, before being promoted to institutional banking chief in 2019, a move many saw as an experience-gathering mission critical to her securing the top job. Tan will serve as deputy CEO until Gupta’s departure.